Mahjongg for the Gamin' Soul
by Shin-no-Nekochan
Summary: Gojyo reflects on how the four of them play Mahjongg, why they started playing it in the first place, and what it meant after the first bout with Kamisama. As usual, it's all Goku's fault. [Gojyo POV, Oneshot] Please Read & Review!


_Mahjongg for the Gamin' Soul_

_A Story for the _Smoke Signals _Thread_

By Nekochan

**Author's Note**

_You don't have to have to read any other of my Smoke Signals stories to read this particular story. It's a Gojyo POV story and I rarely do anything but 3rd-Person Omniscient, so I hope it sounds like him! I would love to explain how to play Mahjongg, but I really can't. I learned from this guy named David, my Naxi native minority guide when I was in China, and the best way I can try to explain it is Rummy with Domino-tiles._

_Arigatou Minasan! (Thanks everyone!)_

_Nekochan_

(-)(-)(-)

No one should be surprised at how much we play Mahjongg, really. It's the only game we all know how to play. Everyone knows the rules and guns it to win. Among your friends, it's not about who wins, but **how** - how fast, how many points, how many discards, how much the bet was, yadda yadda yadda...

Funny, though, the other guys don't act like themselves when it's game-time. I can read their expressions only 'cuz I've sat down to so many other games in my life.

Goku sits there quietly thinking for once. When the round starts, he stares intently at his tiles, trying to run all the combinations he could make in his head so he knows which suits to keep an eye out for. He actually hesitates for the first pass or two, really taking the time to decide on his actions. No pleas for food, no calls on cheating, just silent contemplation. It's really spooky when the kid drudges up his concentration like that. Sometimes he'll be just sitting there with his chin in his hand and his elbow propped on his knees, then, all of a sudden - YOINK - he grabs a tile off the table and crows, "RON! Ha, take that!"

Hakkai frowns and takes no prisoners - there's a reason he gets called a Cardshark every time he tries to play a game at the local tavern back near Chang'an. That guy is really ruthless but then just disperses all your claims of cheating with an innocent smile, saying, "_Sumimasen ne_," like he's actually sorry. Jerk. It's not right that he can keep such careful tabs on everyone's play styles as well as I can count cards - meh, tiles, cards, whatever. He can tell when a person's playing close to the vest or bluffing or actually doing well. He's got a pretty good poker-face of his own, too, man . . . If I didn't know the guy as well as I do, not even the great Sha Gojyo could read him during a game of cards or Mahjongg or anything.

Sanzo-_sama_, weirdly enough, is impulsive with exactly ZERO insults to share with us. He's one of those guys that picks up a tile and studies it carefully before putting it onto his little rack, like he's got some kind of _Feng Shui_ order (1) that has to be maintained for him to win properly. Isn't it something that he cares more about those little tiles than he cares about some of us - or at least that's how he acts out in public. Heh. One look in those purple eyes when he's playing will tell you that he gets desperate to win, too. There's this funny little glaze that comes over him when he's about to call because he slips back on his public face, just a minute too early, meaning I can jump on the opportunity and try to ruin him. Call me cruel, but the light that flashes in his eyes and the pink on his cheeks when he gets indiginant is just too much for me to pass up.

I don't think I change, though. Put on my poker-face, maybe, but not 'change' to the extent that those guys do. I dunno why that is. Prolly 'cuz I'm just that good, heh.

Then the round ends and things return to normal for a minute or two. But, as soon as the next round starts, they go right back to being odd again.

It's the monkey's fault that we play it at all, though. The _chibi_ came bounding up to the three of us one day about two years ago now demanding to 'play'. Normally, Hakkai could keep the kid busy for hours with all of the games he knew for young children, but apparently that wasn't good enough for the brat anymore. He wanted to play with **all** of us.

We tried playing a few more kiddy games, but Sanzo got bored with that real quick. **You** try getting Mr. High Priest to play Tag or fly a kite sometime and see how well it goes. Not well, I promise you. And it's not like I wasn't a pro at stuff like Go Fish by now. Other games we knew boys played needed too many people 'cuz we'd played them as kids ourselves - 'us' meaning me & Hakkai, of course. I couldn't believe Sanzo didn't know what 'Blob' or 'Mother May I' was, but then again I'd forgotten he'd been so sheltered as a kid.

Goku wanted to try thinking up some games for us to play but they were all real stupid. Like who could eat their ice-cream or snow-cone fastest on a hot summer day, or who could write their name the fastest in the dirt with a stick . . . Aw, geez, don't even get me started on stick-finding . . . **_Man_**, that kid could find sticks anywhere we tried to take him. I'm not talking little bitty things either, no, he would find **branches** and bring them back to us for evaluation. Hakkai tried teaching me the system one time but I was too busy laughing because the stick was bigger than the kid was. We eventually taught him to fish but it didn't hold his attention for long. Plus, it wasn't something we were doing **together** and I guess that was pretty important to the kiddo 'cuz he eventually narrowed it to tabletop games.

I ran through every card game I knew and some that I made up on the fly, but nothing satisfied _Chibi _Goku - his hunger for playing seemed to rival that of eating. Most of the games required him to hold more cards in his hand than he could manage, even with both hands. Plus, he was always leaning over so we could see his cards. Hakkai tried to keep reminding him, but it was no use. We even tried War and Egyptian Rat-Screw, but then he kept peeking at the cards.

Checkers and Chess couldn't be played by four people and neither could Tic-tac-toe. Jan-ken-pon was a nice way of determining order, but not as a game unto itself. Go and Shogi made Goku whine too much because **he** couldn't plan out far enough in advance to actually be good at it. I didn't mind giving up on it anyway 'cuz Sanzo & Hakkai almost always won and I'm nothing if not a sore loser.

Finally, me & Hakkai tried picking up new games from the tavern. Dice games from Sailors didn't work out 'cuz Goku kept throwing the dice across the room. Board-games from foreigners were no good 'cuz no one sells those games out here. We thought about asking some of the women for games they played as girls, but the idea of Sanzo playing Spin-the-bottle or Truth-or-dare had us laughing too hard to ever ask any of them.

Then came the day we tried Dominoes. After the fifth time that Goku slammed one domino into another and destroyed the figure we'd been making in a game of Chicken-Scratch, Sanzo said, "Give it up already, you may as well try to teach him Mahjongg."

Leave it to Sanzo to give the _bakazaru_ a challenge. As soon as he'd said that, the kid started demanding to play it. He was **so** bad at it in the beginning, especially when it was his turn to deal. He'd have to count the blocks on the wall at least three times before we could start. He couldn't remember all the terminology for winning and ended up calling early **a lot**. Plus he'd get the suits mixed up **all** the time - I admit the One of Sticks is a little weird to see as a Sticks tile, but honestly, Flowers and Kanji don't look anything alike. Never have, never will.

He got the hang of it, though. Just took a lot of practice. Lots and lots of practice - I think it was a year before the kid won his first hand and I swear I'll bet all of China heard him when he did. Sanzo wouldn't even "waste his time" playing until Goku'd gone an entire game without making a mistake with just me & Hakkai playing. It sucks playing only 3-person Mahjongg too 'cuz then you can't use a lot of the rules, like passing out the Directional tiles.

Heh. That's one of my favorite ways of teasing Sanzo these days - making sure he's dealt the 'West' tile and yours truly getting 'South' so I'm sitting **right** next to him. I like Hakkai sittin' across from me so we don't mess up each other's games, meaning he gets 'North', leaving Goku with 'East'. At least the kid's within' bonking distance - every now & again he still makes a mistake or two. He gets more riled up about it these days now that we've started betting - now that we've got chores to dish out duties for.

That's why I wasn't too surprised after all when Goku insisted on playing Mahjongg the night after we'd been defeated by Kami-sama. The kid's not that great with words, so this was a way to get his feelings across to all of us on a level we all knew very well. If you think Goku's ever used that strategy before - using the discards so much - you're dead wrong, or he'd have been beating all three of us more often - because we wouldn't have been expecting it - when we started playing it almost religiously . . . when we started on this journey westward.

Grabbing from the discard pile is risky business. For someone who can count cards like me, you pretty much end up giving away what's in your hand. Not only that, you're limited by what everyone else has already tossed. Sure, you may need that one tile the other guy just happened to throw down, but to use that as a winning strategy? You've got to be pretty darn lucky or have one hell of a good eye. I really don't know how the rookie managed it, but he did.

_"It's easy to win against guys who've already decided to lose."_

I guess even monkeys can impart wisdom when the stakes are that high.

Hakkai got the hint right away, but it's not like he needed the game metaphor to understand where Goku's heart was. He's the insightful one, after all, always psychoanalyzing every little thing any one of us says. He made that 'wounded animal' comment about Goku, anyway.

Sanzo probably was the first one to know what the monkey was up to even if he was the last to agree with it. Any strategy that ended with him getting the Maten Sutra back should've been all right in his book. Maybe it was some 'pride' thing that made him not want to agree right away or maybe he was just waiting for the rest of us to get our heads back on & decide to go back willingly rather than let the damn fool try to get his precious Sutra back all on his own.

That's why I made him sit down and play with us, too. No way in hell was I going to let His Holiness go get himself ripped apart by a stupidly powerful lunatic. I've found that actually works pretty well with guys too focused on themselves to see the bigger picture - a picture that would kill them as soon as look at them, like when Hakkai went mental during that crap with Chin Yisou. So, just like I did to Hakkai, I pushed Sanzo down to sit at the low table by his shoulder. He graciously remembered to fold his knees or I'm sure I would've gotten smacked for making him hit his knees on the hard ground, but even that wouldn't 've deterred me - someone's got to make him see reason when it's staring him in the face with big golden eyes. Sure, Hakkai takes care of his health, but I know what it's like to be hard-headed and that often means all you can do is butt heads for awhile until someone lets up.

I gave in to the monkey's weird skill with tactics 'cuz, like I said, I'm a sore loser; getting back at that sonofabitch for what he did to Ginkaku and Kinkaku and making sure he stopped doing it was all that was important. And frankly, I still hate that 'God' bastard's guts, even though we managed to defeat him after all . . . 'cuz he couldn't even be bothered to save his own pathetic life. I gave up that idea a long time ago, that anyone else is going to save your sorry ass **for** you.

_"If you die, nothing will change. If you live, things might change."_

Can't believe I still remember that one . . . Feels like Sanzo said it such a long time ago . . .

Change I can deal with if it's a change for the better. That's why it didn't take much for me to go along with Goku's idea. Change means things stay interesting. The only kind of life I don't think I could stand anymore is a boring one. That's another reason I like playing Mahjongg with those guys - it really never gets old. Somehow, every game is completely different from each one before it. Just like Goku coming up with that Taking-From-The-Discard-Pile strategy.

My now 'interesting' life is a daily gamble and I always play to win. Lucky for me, though, it's also a game I can help my friends win. Foul-tempered, droopy-eyed, pretty-boy quasi-monks, too.

(-)(-)(-)

_**-owari-**_

_3/8/2007_

_(1) Feng Shui is the ancient Chinese practice of placement and arrangement of space to achieve harmony with the environment. The literal translation is "wind and water". Feng shui involves the use of geographical, psychological, philosophical, mathematical, aesthetic, and astrological concepts in relation to space and energy flow. It is not simply a decorating style, but a discipline with guidelines compatible with many different techniques of architectural planning. (Wikipedia)_

_Yay I finished another one! (Big grin) Wow it actually turned out to be an honest-to-god One-shot! (swirly eyes) Unbelievable!_

_I really don't get it, but somehow Gojyo's POV is **SO** easy to write! And all of Goku's antics can totally be blamed on my own little brother. I'm 5 years older than my brother and Gojyo's 4 years older than Goku, physically, probably more than that in terms of mentality (lol). Notice I didn't say 'maturity' XD because honestly I don't think boys mature past the age of 15, but that's just me._

_Nekochan_

**Japanese Definitions**

-Sama - honorific suffix giving the highest regard to a person or their title / position (often used by Gojyo in a sarcastic fashion)

Sumimasen ne - "Please forgive me, won't you?" / "I'm terribly sorry." / "I apologize." / "You're right, I'm sorry."

Chibi - little / small with a childlike cuteness connotation

Bakazaru - stupid monkey


End file.
